Quote

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Problem
Major
Tuberculosis
Look
Biggest
Cholera
Looks
Challenge
Maternal
Health
Rebuilding
Problems
Haiti
Challenges
Mortality
Public
Systems
Words
Majors

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.
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The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
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I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
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Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
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The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
Paul Farmer
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
Paul Farmer